ARTIST STATEMENT FOR SOUTHWESTERN INSTALLATION - 1995
(THIS STATEMENT WAS HANDED OUT TO THE VIEWERS AS THEY ENTERED THE INSTALLATION AREA.)
The work seen in this installation, "DIE PLAGE," constitutes my total artistic output over the past two years. "DIE PLAGE" occupies a special place for me in my varied work of some thirty-five years that has included music, photography, and many different media in the plastic arts. It is with this present work, however, that I have been able to bring together for the first time many diverse areas of thought relating specifically to the arts as well as other cultural areas of consideration such as religion and spirituality, psychology, and even the fabric of history itself.
A primary source for much of my thinking has always been the German-Speaking Culture as it existed, and subsequently evolved from the end of the nineteenth century to the close of World War II. Of particular interest to me has been the unique interaction between German Jews and the so-called "Aryan" Germans, an interaction not so different from that of the Black and White populations of America.) That I am able to identify equally with both Jewish and "Aryan" Germans as I do with both Blacks and Whites and their special, albeit precarious place in the two cultures has given me, I feel, a unique vantage point in approaching the history and drama of that epoch in Germany, both as an insider and an outsider.
I have approached, what I currently think of as a "re-enactment" of that time from those two vantage points. On the one hand as the insider, a living participant of that period moving through those events as they were occurring, without any foreknowledge of their outcome. Then, as an outsider, on the other hand, working backward through layers of historical distance with full knowledge of the outcome and therefore full knowledge of the futility that permeated the cultural arguments as they were framed in that period. The place and or point in time, not an actuality, where these vantage points "converge" are as real for me as they are imagined. I have constructed, so to speak, my own arena, with its own laws of physics and language, to re-engage a fight that was in itself the inevitable destruction of that culture. The monumental loss of life that ultimately occurred was as logical a conclusion as it was seemingly aberrant for an ideological culture that had been turned so drastically on its head so as to suffer "permanent brain damage". To properly play out what for me has been a real, though abstracted, reconstruction of events, I have had to assume both sides of the conflict; that of the Nazi's and that of those opposed to the Nazis. As I have progressed through the work, the composing of individual canvases has gradually assumed a character similar to that of one person playing both sides of the chessboard. I, standing in for Hitler who is saying to me, "All that you can see in these photographs . . . I, have accomplished all of this. Show me what you can do." In making "DIE PLAGE" I have been as honest and unsparing on both sides as possible. I have pitted the brutality of the intellect against the brutality of the bully; a fight and a tradition, it seems to me, well suited for anyone taking on the life and death stakes involved in any ideological, socio-ethnic conflict.
It is my hope that the viewers of my work will see the dual nature of what is being depicted. On the one hand, "DIE PLAGE" exists as an homage to that period, summoning up the loss of ideas, energy, and ultimately human life. "DIE PLAGE" is also a warning that if and when a culture allows itself to be built on a foundation of silencing individuals and their personally unique thoughts in favor of an expedient collective goal, everyone will be made to suffer. The poet, Heine, stated it very clearly: "Where they burn books, they will soon burn people."
The final section of "DIE PLAGE" (Here referring to SECTION IV as it then existed, not the expanded version of Section IV or the "MURAL SECTION") is intended as an epilogue. In it, the demons, confusions, and fears that abound in all of us, but ones that we generally choose not to address, are depicted graphically without any narrative context. The abrupt shift in the appearance of these canvases as well as their somewhat whimsical, comic nature is intentional. I offer these last images in the spirit of the writer Herman Hesse, as they might have existed for him when he created the Magic Theater in his novel Steppenwolf. It is there in the theater that Harry Haller finds himself being told by Mozart that he must learn to laugh. The decision to "laugh" at our posing, and address our own demons, confusions, and fears constructively rather than to deny their existence and allow them to run amok is ours to make.
H.G.
